Menu

Christmas card season! I love this season so much. Being able to catch up with family and friends over the year and see how the kids have grown and how families have changed or who went on vacation where. I love seeing the snapshot of their year and their family. A great feeling of connectedness during the holiday season!

This year called for a new address from the Koch Clan! Although we aren’t in there yet, we have sold our house and moved in with the in-laws for a couple months until our renovations are complete, so I was not about to change my address twice! Gives me a reason to go check on the house every day – gotta get the mail! :)

This year, I LOVED our photos from Lauren Neff (see our family photos here). They were full of green and nature and I went for a deep green and navy theme with all of our outfits. I LOVE the hunter green trend I’m seeing everywhere right now, just look at all of these! The “berry merry” trend is seriously stunning as well!

Usually, I am all about simplicity in a holiday card (see ours from 2017, 2016, 2015), let the photo do the talking, however, this year, give me all the bold florals! Maybe it’s my obsession with large bloom floral wallpaper (basically every wallpaper on here!!), but this “Lush Winter Foliage” card was exactly what I was imagining to match our photos! I really loved the border of florals that surround our card, it perfectly accentuates our outfits and nature, so pretty. And the pop of blush pink makes it feminine and calming to me. Plus the tanish/gold border frame looks beautiful with the wheat grass in our photo. Really love our card this year! It was actually an easy decision for me this year, I’m one of those people who have to see 100 examples before picking one, but this year, I went straight to this design!

Last month we took our family photos with Lauren Neff and we love how they turned out! After the last two years in the downtown Sioux Falls city scene (see those photos here – 2017, 2016), we opted for nature once again and headed to The Outdoor Campus. It’s so beautiful there with the trees and prairie grass, and the sun and weather were absolutely perfect! We all got dressed in our best, bribed the kids with snacks, and mentally prepared ourselves for the photo session. I love the mini sessions because seriously, these kids (and my husband!) can only last 15-30 minutes! It was the perfect amount of time and the kids were behaving so well, thank the Lord. Love how they turned out!

Whew! Time for some house blogs! Today I’m going to share the progress on the kids’ bedrooms with some before pics and during remodel pics. The upstairs of the house is finally looking like an actual house instead of a complete tornado of demo and dust! After many hours of figuring out how to redesign the upstairs two apartments back to single family, we finally came up with 4 bedrooms (master, Ivy, Leo, and Faye’s), 3 bathrooms (girl’s shared, Leo’s, and master bath), a laundry room (previously an apartment’s kitchen), and a playroom (previously an apartment’s dining room). We combined some rooms, closed off some hallways and doorways, and even knocked down several walls to design the space to make it best liveable for our family. We got walls up and sheetrock and mudding going on this week! Excited to share this progress!

IVY’S BEDROOM – Starting with Ivy’s bedroom! This was an apartment’s living room but also had access to the closet, which was originally a closed in patio with french doors out to a little patio. It’s neat to see the old pictures, but, the patio is definitely not usable and the french doors (that were downstairs in the basement and we are reusing for our master closet!!!) were replaced with windows. The patio columns are still in her closet! It’s kinda weird but also kinda cool. Haha. Here’s a picture of the house back in the day! You can see the patio and french doors in the very top right corner of the house!

Fun fact: I kind of always wanted to live on a farm! Minus the manure and farm work (the hard stuff!), I always admired a life of being close to our food, animals, and outdoors. I have always been curious about where our food comes from, how it’s produced, and learning more about healthy ways of living. That’s where I am so thankful for Hungry for Truth! I’ve been involved with them now for about three years and it has filled the gap between consumer and farmer to educate me and others about how our food is raised and its safety. And this last weekend, I got to take my family along with me for a tour of a farm! We had so much fun living like little farmers (without the messy hard work!) and got to see all the animals and beautiful green fields of alfalfa.

Today was a rough day! We are officially MOVED OUT of our house! We hauled our last few boxes out of the beautiful home, did a few loops and reminisced, slowly shut the door behind us, and I couldn’t even look back because of the tears in my eyes, such a bittersweet feeling.

As I was walking around the house, remembering a happy memory in each room, the hardest rooms for me to be in were the kids’ bedrooms. We brought all three of our babies home to this house. We grew into parents in this house. We have watched them grow up from babies to crawlers to walkers and to crazy spunky fun toddlers. We held them as they cried and hugged them as they were happy in this house. We saw them all take their first steps in this house. All those memories within these walls. I think what is hardest is that these kids won’t even remember this house. They’re all so young. They won’t remember me rocking them to bed as babies in their bedrooms, or teaching them how to go potty in the bathrooms, or teaching them how to ride a bike in the driveway. That’s what’s so weird. All of our memories in this house are just that, memories. Memories we will take with us as we shut that door for the last time.